David Bristow wasn’t meant to be a sports journalist.

He is too smart. Too interested in real-world topics. He was meant to make news, not report on it.

But for 3-4 years there, he did more than dabble in sports journalism, and we all had a splendid time.

David may be as fondly remembered by everyone — and I mean, everyone, from co-workers to sources — as anyone who worked at the San Bernardino Sun in the past 30 years. He is relentlessly upbeat, mentally acute, funny as hell — and an extraordinarily decent human being. A combination of qualities not often found in a newsroom. Or anywhere else, actually.

Bristow eventually became a lawyer, serving first as a deputy district attorney and gaining recognition on a network television newsmagazine for refusing, on principle, to prosecute a Third Strike case (for which he was fired, moving almost immediately to the public defender’s office). He soon became a prominent attorney in Riverside, president of the Riverside County Bar Association and probably will be a judge sometime soon.

But back in 1987 he was a part-timer in The Sun sports department, apparently amused by our high-energy antics — and about to show us he could make the jump from agate clerk to baseball writer on a hot, new beat, the San Bernardino Spirit of the California League.

I’m hazy on how David Bristow got into the department. He was a student at Cal State San Bernardino, and I think he saw an opening for part-time work posted on a bulletin board there. I don’t know how else he could have known about us or I about him.

He applied. I interviewed him. It was fairly clear he wasn’t really all that conversant about sports. Not in the way so many of our clerks were, who know sports history, had played every game and swim effortlessly in sports trivia, etc.

But he was a bright boy. That was clear. And I always preferred trainable intelligence over brain-power-limited sports wonks.

David had played in the band at La Sierra High School. I doubt he ever thought he would be paid money to pay attention to sports. But there he was, clean-cut and whip-smart, and I figured we could make something of the blond kid from Cal State.

He joined us in 1985 or 1986. He started at the bottom, doing the usual agate gig, answering phones, writing small gamers, doing the occasional food run. He is mentioned elsewhere in the blog for one of the odder requests I made of an agate clerk — to go out on the road and find a colleague who had gone into diabetic shock while covering a prep game 45 miles away. Our guy was in a donut shop. That’s all we could tell David.

David found him.

By 1987, we knew a California League baseball team was moving to San Bernardino. It was a big deal. A very big deal. No significant pro franchise had been in town for something like 35 years, and this was one of the teams from a tradition-steeped league that had been north of the Tehachapis for most of its existence.

What was better: The team was partly owned by actor Mark Harmon, who was in his “Most Beautiful Person” phase with People Magazine. That gave the team instant panache.

We had a new beat in town. And we needed a beat writer. All the full-timers were dedicated to other teams and stories. Eventually, I settled on David Bristow as the guy to cover the new team, and he was perfect.

The San Bernardino Spirit turned out to be a great story, and Bristow was the man who told most of it. From the days of open tryouts for the independent team (unassociated with a big-league team and, thus, stuck finding its own players and coaches) … to the boffo opening night to the grind of the 142-game regular season … to the final week, when the Cinderella team smashed Cal League attendance records and came within a whisker of making the playoffs.

The Spirit was a collection of castoffs and free spirits, knuckleheads and charlatans, masterfully managed by former major-leaguer Rich Dauer, who thoroughly appreciated leading that band of merry men … and the whole mess was covered, home and road (all the way up to Reno and Stockton) by David.

It was remarkably fun. The city embraced the team, the franchise was well-run, its home games were a riot of sound and color and good ball, and it put the city on the map. And Bristow was along for the ride, explaining it to our readers.

He might have been the first traveling beat writer in the history of the California League. He made every Spirit trip, and the Cal League had some exotic stops back then: Salinas, Fresno, Reno, Palm Springs — in addition to holdovers in Modesto, Bakersfield, Stockton, Visalia and San Jose.

It was a league in the process of being reinvented, and within a decade it would have five new stadiums. But in 1987 it was still a collection of old, often quirky civic ballparks with rudimentary press facilities and primitive amenities for fans and players.

David followed the team, filing on deadline night after night, often dealing with situations where the home team had no telephone, or maybe one that had to be shared. Sometimes dictating box scores because somebody’s fax machine didn’t work.

David made that team come alive. We found out about this guy’s musical tastes, that guy’s weird interest in books (always odd, among ballplayers). He made friends with some of the brighter guys on the team, which he probably shouldn’t have, in terms of pure journalism. But he was about the same age as the men he covered, and if he got caught up in a “cow-tipping” night out in Modesto or a “snipe hunt” in the fields outside Bakersfield, was there when the team bus broke down trying to wheeze over the Grapevine … or witnessed Spirit players throwing furniture off a balcony and into the pool at the team motel in Reno … well, it made him more of an insider.

At one point in the season, we had him ride the team bus and do a major piece on that aspect of the minor-league experience. (He usually drove his own car.) When he came back, he had anecdotes galore, and wrote a really fine piece of journalism that I could find if I broke open the box I have in storage that has the 1987 sports sections in it.

When David took over the beat, I’m not sure he knew all of baseball’s rules.

By the first month of the season, he was as conversant with the game as any member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

In 1988, he covered the team’s second season. By then it was affiliated with the Seattle Mariners and even though Ken Griffey Jr. made his professional debut in San Bernardino (hitting a home run in a victory), it wasn’t quite as fun. These were Mariners employees, not as apt to shenanigans. But David did a fine job, again, and the club set another attendance record.

Soon after, perhaps 1989, David went off to law school. He was ready to get on with the serious part of his life. The Sun had been something of a lark for him. At first, some money on the side hanging around with wacky journos. And then came the ball team, which I’m fairly certain was sheer fun for our guy. During that period of time when some guys make slow tours of Europe, having adventures … David was zipping up and down the 99 freeway, seeing the state, having adventures.

He got his law degree, and since then it’s been onward and upward.

Several of the people I worked with went on to significant titles and jobs. Jim Schulte, Brian Neale, Joel Boyd, Nate Ryan, David Leon Moore … lots of them.

But none became lawyers. None became president of the Riverside County bar. None is in line to become a Superior Court judge and, perhaps, an elected official someday.

David is in his mid-40s now. He lives in Riverside with his wife and infant daughter. He has kept in contact with us all along, and still plays (usually not well) in the Sun Baseball League. He officiated at my wedding.

I wish I could include mug shots with everyone in this series, but I just don’t have them. David is an exception: Here is his bio with his current law firm, along with a mug shot.

Much of what I recall of all all these folks who worked with us putting out sports sections is about fond memories.

With David Bristow, it’s 100 percent fond. He was great to have around, did fine work, was always up for a challenge and didn’t mind telling people that, yes, he actually enjoyed what he was doing. Turns out, he was too talented to spend his life covering ball. And that’s a good thing for everyone who lives in the Inland Empire.